The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [83]
What would his children regret? How could he keep them from having regrets? They are so different. Miller, always determined to do the right thing in the right way, marrying at twenty-four, now on his way to being a father. Fee, so shy and diffident, a mystery even to herself. Gwen, her mother all over again, which scares him more than anything. He wishes he could protect them from disappointment, but he lost that battle long ago. Once, when Miller was very young, Clem drove him to a railroad crossing in South Baltimore, near Stockholm Street. A freight train finally lumbered past, a long one with varied cars. Miller, not even four at the time, was thrilled. When the last car passed, the train’s whistle blowing, he turned to his father and said: “Again.” And when Clem could not make it happen, he cried bitterly, upset not only by the lack of another train but at his father’s impotence.
Clem himself has no regrets. Well—he had no personal regrets until a little over a year ago, and he still can’t see what he might have done differently, so is that truly regret? He crests another hill, sees the little house on the other side of the stream. Is there smoke coming from the chimney? Are there chickens in the yard? He speeds up, almost running, splashing through the creek without thinking about his shoes, much less the risk of tetanus. It was all a horrible dream, then. The night never happened, the man never died, that’s why his body didn’t show up at the morgue.
But when he reaches the house, there is no smoke, and the “chickens” are old newspapers, blowing lazily in the breeze. The house looks different, though. And Clem can be sure of this because his walks, over the past fourteen months, keep leading him back here, although he hasn’t entered the yard for a month or two. Someone has been here recently. Probably kids. Only it looks neater, which makes no sense. Kids, even good kids, don’t leave things neater.
How did the children ever find their way here? It’s a question he has asked himself over and over again. The adults knew about the old man, of course, if not his predilections. In winter, the cabin’s roof was visible from the road they all used as a shortcut. But to the grown-ups, the house was a blight, an embarrassment. Clem and Tally, in particular, felt odd, living down the street from a man whose life seemed little better than a sharecropper’s. Meanwhile the Hallorans were appalled because the man was black, not that they were polite enough to use that term, or even Negro. Doris Halloran pronounced people “colored,” as if it were the enlightened thing to say, and Tim Senior—well, he liked to mix up his epithets. He seemed to think his large stock of synonyms passed for wit. Jungle bunny, coon, tar baby, spear chucker. But never nigger, which only convinced Clem that Tim was dangerously racist beneath his I’m-just-having-fun-I-dare-you-to-say-otherwise gaze. Clem wonders if he still uses those words. He doesn’t know, because he can’t bear to be in the same room with the man, not that they had spent much time in each other’s company before the night of the hurricane. Maybe at a potluck, or the progressive dinner Tally put together one time, inspired by a book she was reading to Gwen, but he wasn’t sure.
He tries to tell himself that he objected to Sean as Gwen’s first boyfriend because of Sean’s father, his fear that any apple that dropped from the Halloran tree had to be poisoned. Oh, he liked Sean as much as any man could like